NMC Culinary and Ag Tech Students Learn How to Feed America

In the Great Lakes Culinary Institute (GLCI), six white towers gleaming under halos of LED lights stand sentry along the corridor. Evenly-spaced pods of green lettuce, basil, parsley, and flowering plants circle the towers, and a faint swoosh of fortified water inside bathing their roots beckons all five senses. 

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Culinary Institute Director Chef Les Eckert, meets with the NMC Agriculture Technology students tending the towers. 

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“We need the basil harvested today because Chef Morse is making pesto,” she said as they inspect the leaves. Lettuce had been picked last week, yielding just over a pound from two towers. This amount supplemented the lettuce already purchased for the restaurant’s salads that day.

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Chef Eckert purchased these towers three years ago with the help of a donor to help demonstrate local food concepts to students, a movement that has changed the way chefs and consumers think about food in America. 

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But sourcing food locally at the peak of freshness is not the only aspect of this movement. Environmental stewardship, food security, and economic sustainability are tenets of local food ideology as well. 

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This is why the culinary students learn and practice optimization at each level. Ingredients are thoughtfully procured to minimize mileage:

packaging is recycled; bones and vegetable scraps are simmered into stock; used coffee grounds are steeped to flavor freshly made ice cream. What cannot be used, reused, or recycled is composted. Almost nothing goes in the trash. 

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Big Ag, Rabbits, and Plant Poachers

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Are sustainable practices in culinary achievable on the scale needed to feed Northwestern Michiganders, let alone 340 million Americans? GLCI’s grow towers cost $800 each, and Chef Eckert estimates Lobdell’s would need 24 of them to provide the required amount of lettuce, fresh herbs, and edible flowers for their menu. 

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High upfront cost is just one reason why everyone is thinking about local food, but relatively few are engaged in it. The belief that large-scale, high-yield agriculture, known as “Big Ag,” is the most effective way to feed a large population has been embedded in American culture since U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz aggressively promoted it in the 1970s. 

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Government policies also favor large agribusinesses over small farms that produce food for local distribution. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped K-12 schools and childcare centers purchase fresh food from nearby farms. 

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Local Food Purchase Assistance met the same fate. This program addressed food insecurity by supporting food banks in sourcing fresh food from local producers. 

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While the current administration saved about $1 billion by cutting these programs, it has authorized over $30 billion in ad hoc subsidies for producers of large-scale commodity crops such as soy, corn, and sorghum, according to the USDA.

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Big Ag also includes meat production. Americans’ appetite for animal-based protein spurred Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, commonly known as factory farming. In the US, about 75 % of beef, 98 percent of pork, and 99% of poultry are raised in confined, high-density settings to maximize production, according to 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture data.

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Dean Sparks, pit master and owner of Traverse City restaurants Sparks BBQ and The Pretty Penny Steakhouse, would be happy to buy all his ingredients locally, but said it is hard to execute in Northern Michigan because smaller area farms cannot produce enough meat for his restaurants. He visits farmers’ markets to source local produce in the fall when it is most abundant.

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Challenges to the local food movement exist right outside our doors as well. Chef Eckert explained why the culinary institute does not grow produce outside the building, which would cost less than purchasing grow towers, “We tried growing other things, but the rabbits ate the parsley, and people picked the peppers. They even dug up the plants.” 

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Why Try?

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Chef Eckert acknowledged that while impressive, the grow towers are not the solution in the quest to supply Americans with healthy food. “Sustainability is a puzzle with 10 million pieces. At GLCI, we teach the students what local food and environmental stewardship look like at this moment in time and hope they don’t forget about it, are interested, and ask questions when they go on their own.” 

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GLCI alum Chef Emily Fitzpatrick is doing that very thing. She started her culinary training at the same time Chef Eckert introduced the grow towers. Chef Fitzpatrick had never seen anything like them before and became a fan. She especially enjoyed pointing them out to Lobdell’s customers. 

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“See that basil garnish on your plate? That grew right over there,” she recalls saying when talking about the stately soldiers stationed visible through the dining room. 

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The culinary institute sparked her interest in growing food and showed her where America stands in the local food movement. During a two-week study abroad in Switzerland, she realized that America is catching up to how the rest of the world eats. 

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The local food movement isn’t a thing overseas because it is what they have always done, she explained. 

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It All Comes Down to Relationships

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Chef Fitzpatrick caters at The Hagerty Center, an event venue in Traverse City, where she puts into practice what she learned at GCLI. The Center cooks with local produce when in season and collects all its prep scraps—up to 25 gallons daily—for composting by a local farmer. 

 

When asked what challenges area restaurants may have with implementing farm-to-table or environmental stewardship, she said that it all comes down to relationships: chefs must know what farmers are growing, raising, or composting, then work with them to coordinate timing, price, delivery, or pickup. 

 

This year, GCLI and the MSU Institute of Agricultural Technology (IAT) at NMC established a relationship around the grow towers. Culinary students appreciate what the grow towers produce, but do not have the capacity to manage them, whereas the Ag Tech students do. The grow towers are also fostering communication between student chefs and farmers by prompting discussions about varieties, harvest times, and yields. 

 

A Taste of Success, GLCI’s signature fundraising event, is taking place on April 24. Chef Eckert just relayed the restaurant’s produce needs for the event to the Ag Tech students, who are now harvesting lettuce from another grow tower to ensure the next crop matures in time. This tower yielded one and a half pounds—their biggest harvest to date. The IAT Program Coordinator, Cristin Hosmer, also ordered six more grow towers.